IN PRAISE OF THE TIMES.

Since I frequently have occasion to lambast the NY Times here, I take pleasure in patting them on the back when they do something right: in this case, gracing their year-end Week in Review section with essays by Languagehat’s house lexicographer, Grant Barrett (“Glossary“), and one of my favorite linguists, Geoff Nunberg (“Faith“). The whole issue is focused on words and has a lot of interesting items, but I particularly recommend those two.

So, increasingly, scientists are asking: Why must we endure an epidemic every year?
The answer, said Dr. M. Elizabeth Halloran, a statistician at Emory University, is, “Maybe we don’t.”

That mismatch of “why must we”/”we don’t [have to]” may be an editing glitch, but it may also reflect a linguistic confusion I’ve heard in speech: we seem to mentally translate “must” to the more colloquial “have to” for the purposes of negation (since the traditional negative of “we must” is the unintuitive “we needn’t”), and rather than say the full “we don’t have to” we elide the “have to” just as if the question had been “Why do we have to endure an epidemic?”

Comments

In Australia the observant pedant winces at such phenomena frequently. Here’s a typical exchange:
“Have we got time to go shopping?”
“No, we don’t.”
We don’t what? We don’t have got time? Ah, you mean we don’t have time! But that’s not what I asked…
This resembles the diagnosis Languagehat gives; but I also consider these cases to be splicings of two standards: Australian with its very British retention of “got”, and American with its loss of it.
Here’s a question, while I’m at it. Is the following infelicity gaining ground in Vespuccia, as it is in Ozland?
“We used to work between about nine in the morning, when we’d have to punch the clock on the way in, to about ten at night, with only half an hour for lunch.”
A surprising number of educated speakers have lost the notion that “between” demands a continuation of the form “A and B”, and that surrounding verbiage softens this requirement not one whit.

And you can support my book habit without even spending money on me by following my Amazon links to do your shopping (if, of course, you like shopping on Amazon); I get a small percentage of every dollar spent while someone is following my referral links, and every month I get a gift certificate that allows me to buy a few books (or, if someone has bought a big-ticket item, even more). You will not only get your purchases, you will get my blessings and a karmic boost!

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